After finishing my listen of this audiobook version of Ray Bradbury's classic text read in high school along with half the rest of the population, it made sense to revisit what I composed earlier and apply a few adaptations.
While there was no revelatory instance as experienced when rereading a couple of prior classic stories from high school days, Homer's 'The Odyssey' and Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", I will admit to new ideas floating through the recesses of my mind as to the subject of censorship in all things idea-oriented.
What I mean to infer by this is basic: the protagonist of this drama, fireman Guy Montag, becomes the guide for the reader through a world with many parallels to our own. Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451" in 1953, and based upon the epilogue he included at the conclusion from a 1981 new edition, what we are experiencing thirty years past as being comparable to his 1953 version of the future apparently never rose to his consciousness.
The book burning. The society speeding by fast. The lack of taking casual strolls with no predetermined purpose. The absence of simply talking: there is talking about 'things', but there is never any talk about the meaning of things.
And there are no books - because books convey ideas of what one person thinks of things, a perspective which could offend someone.
No books. No porches, affixed to houses, where people formerly gathered to talk and discuss. Society is on a train-wreck course to nowhere. Eerily similar to what we experience today, more than fifty years after the original story was set in print.
Now, I realize we find ourselves in no society where men are hired to burn books with fires, rather than put out fires people start. It is a stretch to see such as ever becoming reality. However, if one considers the abandonment of reading by many of today's young people (or even adults who 'just don't have the time') the idea of people no longer reading, turning instead to the vacuous entertainment of the walls (Mildred, Montag's wife, and her 'family' who occupy three of the four walls in their home) runs a close parallel to today's incessant need for quick and easy entertainment from the television offering hundreds of channels and options.
The front porches which used to occupy peoples' homes are vanishing. A person no longer is familiar with his neighbor. Family is the television. Ideas are too difficult to process - like Mildred listening to Montag read from a stolen book.
While the parallels certainly do not follow all the way through the text, and I am no ways calling what Ray Bradbury penned as prophetic; there is an element of it worthy of discussion and serious thought. If we abandon the medium through which ideas are readily conveyed, what becomes of society? Has it already occurred? Are we in the midst of it? Who knows?
As a book to read simply for the reading pleasure all good books should hold, most of what was there I did enjoy. Portions of the text flow into esoteric diatribes where one character carries on and on and on until you wonder if there is anything of substance meant. The 'less is more' seems not to be applied and the story becomes lost in some grand thematic statement the average reader fails to digest.
I found it hard to envision a true setting to this world. The book is characterized as Science Fiction due to its futuristic content, but the picture of that world appeared as no different than my own. Perhaps such a criticism is irrelevant to the book's purpose. For myself, it impeded my understanding when a 'real' world, as opposed to the esoteric world of Montag battling between the world he knew versus the world as it should be, never materializes.
First there was Homer's 'The Odyssey'; then there was Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Now I am testing the fires of classic literature once more with yet another story read during those ubiquitous years of schooling where every English class, every Literature class, every Writing class fills its time with at least one immortal work of fictionalized storytelling over the course of a kid's semester.
As a kid, none of these books meant anything to me. They were mere tales, written years prior to my own entrance onto this life's stage, introduced by someone else as important works of cultural relevance.
Again, as a kid, they were mere stories.
Revisiting them as an adult (The Odyssey and Huck Finn) has been a truly invigorating experience. Having lived a measure of life, reacquainting myself with stories about living life, both offered pieces I to which I could now relate. Will 'Fahrenheit 451', another story read back in the good ol' schooldays of yonder and yore, being a story about burning books, will it trigger the same revelatory inspiration?
I decided on it as the new book to accompany me to the gym, listening to it via the new Playaway format (quite accommodating to any gym workout), because my work took me to libraries within the state. I hoped for some new insights into the debate of books: burning books, banning books, not reading books, abandoning ideas, etc. etc. - enter your own ideas on the transcribing of thoughts and ideas to future generations. Is such what Ray Bradbury intended when he wrote this? I'm not sure. It is what I am looking for as I delve deeper into the story.
Thus far, perhaps a quarter of the way into the text, I see a fireman (one whose job it is to burn the books people hide from the government) beginning to question with new ideas and thoughts, prompted by the unorthodox entrance into his life of a teenage girl who just happens to follow him along the street one night after work. Clarice stirs his thoughts will silly thoughts of nothing most people gloss over as they go about their day. 'Don't old leaves smell like cinnamon?' Ever look at the moon? 'Are you happy'?
Parts of Bradbury's writing disappoint me. While the story is advancing, he has this tendency to overindulge in the descriptive elements, while never fully establishing a setting. This is set in the future; but aside from the talking walls which keep Montag's wife Mildred entertained (there are no books to read) and the job of firemen to burn books, this doesn't offer a picture much different from our own current time.
Maybe that is the idea. Maybe Bradbury was seeking to focus all upon the idea of stifling the ideas in books. There is certainly plenty with this book to discuss.
Now it's
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